Firefox 8 recently found its way into the nightly build channel. According to a recent study by extremetech.com, Firefox 8 is already 20% faster than Firefox 5 in almost every metric and has got a drastically reduced memory footprint as well.

Key Points of the Study

Firefox 8 is 20% faster than Firefox 5 in almost every metric: start up, session restore, first paint, JavaScript execution, and even 2D canvas and 3D WebGL rendering.

Changes are not just under-the-hood, synthetic-benchmark, on-paper thing either: the difference between FF5 and FF8 is very noticeable.

Considerably faster at JavaScript execution, posting benchmark results that are about 15% faster than Firefox 5.

Firefox 8 is as fast or faster than the latest Dev Channel build of Chrome 14. Chrome’s WebGL implementation is still faster, but with Azure, Firefox’s 2D performance is better than Chrome. JavaScript performance is also virtually identical.